Business services, such as banking, telecom or insurance, play a significant role in the day-to-day life of many individuals. Subscribing to any of the services often requires customers to fill-out one or more application forms, which may vary based on the service. For example, a customer seeking to open a new account with a bank completes an account opening form, while a customer seeking to apply for a loan completes a corresponding loan application form. In the current banking scenarios, a customer fills out an application form in the presence of a branch representative and then the completed application form is transferred to a back-office. In the back-office, the completed forms are processed along with various other forms received from other branches and then stored for later retrieval.
Many business service providers may require supporting documents, such as proof of identity and/or address, while administering services such as opening a bank account, or updating customer details. Examples of proof of identities and/or address include Voter ID, passport, and Social Security Number (SSN) documents. These documents are available in various standard and non-standard sizes, and typically are below A4 or A3 sizes. The customer either scans or copies the required supporting documents to create duplicate documents, which are submitted to the bank branch. In the bank branch, these documents are archived in a physical or virtual location. For example, the documents are stored in back offices or in online databases/storage devices. Before archiving, one or more bank staff employees manually enter the type of each document and provide a digital name for the document. This task requires significant effort and time. Additionally, retrieval of these stored documents for various application processing purposes, such as auditing, may be inefficient.
Moreover, in situations where the customer submits multiple supporting documents, scanning each document one at a time becomes tedious and time consuming. In addition, reversing each document on a platen (scanning surface) for double-sided scanning increases amount of time and costs for processing the documents. The above procedures may, thus, constitute an inefficient use of human effort and energy. Although there are a few systems available in the market which are capable of scanning multiple documents together, those systems are not “intelligent” and cannot identify when two different documents are placed or queued for scanning. For example, if a voter ID and PAN card are placed together for scanning, conventional systems consider both as a single document to be scanned and provide a scanned output accordingly.
It may therefore be advantageous to provide methods and systems for handling documents that address the above described inefficiencies.